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After doing what I could with my hair, I hurried to the front of the house. Meanwhile, my date had reached the top of the driveway, and he cut the engine. The moment he stepped out of the car, I caught his scent and paused.
By coincidence, he was part warlock, but there were other elements there, too. Selkie, maybe? Or fae? It all came together in a way that was both interesting and appealing.
But now the question became, did he know he was anything other than human? It wasn’t all that unusual to encounter people with a bit of nonhuman blood in them. After all, the different subspecies had been interbreeding for centuries. But these days, mainstream society wrote off paranormal creatures as myths and fairy tales, even though the real story flowed through a lot of people’s veins.
The wards on the house were set to block nonhuman strangers, so I ran to the front door and threw it open before he bounced off the invisible wall at the foot of the stairs. Shit like that tended to raise a lot of questions.
The guy in my driveway was beautiful. He’d sent a photo while we’d been chatting online and I remembered thinking he was cute, but he was actually much more than that. He was tall, willowy, and graceful, with slightly overgrown golden-blond hair that probably always looked tousled, even if he tried to style it. Even though he was dressed casually in jeans, a dark blue T-shirt, and a leather jacket, there was an elegance and sophistication about him. It was easy to imagine him as a ballet dancer, or something along those lines. Since he’d told me he was a programmer during our chats, it seemed he’d really missed his calling.
As he ran a hand over my car’s shiny fender, I called, “Hey, you must be Logan. I’m Matt.” Nobody ever called me that. My name was actually Mateo, but I’d thought it would be smart to maintain a bit of anonymity on the dating site where we’d met.
“It’s nice to finally meet you, Matt,” he called. “Your Barracuda is a thing of beauty.”
I was nervous as hell, and I wiped my sweaty palms on my jeans as I walked down the stairs. “Thanks. She was in pretty rough shape when she came to me, and restoring her has been a lot of fun.”
We’d initially bonded over our mutual obsession with 1960s and 70s muscle cars, so it wasn’t surprising that he seemed more interested in my Cuda than me. But then he turned to me and flashed a friendly smile. Right about then, I realized I couldn’t read his mind. That was rare, but it happened now and then with certain nonhumans.
He was maybe six-one to my five-foot-nine, and I looked up into inquisitive brown eyes. “You’ve done an amazing job,” he said. “I keep saying I’m going to restore my car, but I barely know where to start.”
I turned to look at his sky blue 1970 Trans Am and said, “It seems to be all original and in pretty decent shape, so my advice is not to go too crazy with the restoration. Sometimes it’s nice to just appreciate a thing for what it is, instead of wishing it was something different.”
When I turned back to him, there was a lull in the conversation as we studied each other. He really was handsome. In fact, he was drastically out of my league. Finally, I remembered my manners and blurted, “Would you like to come inside?” Duh. What else were we going to do, stand in the driveway?
“Sure. Just a minute.” When he walked back to his car, I half-expected him to climb in and speed away to escape from my awkwardness. Instead, he reached through the open passenger window and retrieved a bottle of wine.
He returned to my side and handed it to me, and I glanced at the label and said, “Thanks, this was really thoughtful.” That single bottle of merlot had probably cost more than my entire wine haul, which made me feel like a cheapskate.
As we headed toward the house, I sent out a silent incantation to tell the wards he was a friend, and it was okay to let him in. He followed me up the stairs, and I asked, “Did you have any trouble finding the place?” God, I sucked at small talk. What was I going to ask him next, whether he came here often?
“No, your directions were perfect. Sorry I’m late, by the way. I underestimated traffic, which has to be the worst excuse any Angelino can ever come up with.”
“It happens, so no worries.”
He glanced at the two dozen garden gnomes clustered beside the front door and asked, “Is this your house?”
“No. I live here and look after it, but it actually belongs to a friend of mine. The gnome convention is my doing, though. They were scattered all around the landscaping, and this week I decided to gather them up and relocate them to the backyard. Just to, you know, make the place seem a little more normal.”
